Architecture and Relationality

Professor Gerard Reinmuth is teaching a Masters Studio at the University of Technology this semester in collaboration with philosopher Professor Andrew Benjamin. The studio is titled "An Architecture of Relationality".

The studio builds upon Benjamin's work in philosophy on relations (see his book, "A Relational Ontology") and conversations the two have had over the past 5 years about this concept.

The studio is anchored in the specific assertion that buildings are constituted by and form part of a network of relations. The consequence of such a description is that it then allows any one object – the building as object – to be an after-effect of the relations that pertain within a given conjunction. It follows then that the singularity of any built object is always an after-effect of a network of relations. The studio will engage students with this framework and to engage them in the production of research and propositions that explore this idea.

The image adjacent - of TERROIR's NRAS Student Housing - is one such example of this idea in practice. The drawing illustrates a mapping of the network of public and semi-public spaces around which the 400 student units are arranged. It is this relation of public spaces that organises the project.